The present invention relates to the field of education, in general. More specifically, it relates to a system for, and process of, teaching individuals with hearing disabilities to talk or to express themselves orally with improved intelligibility.
While holding potential for direct application to any individuals who themselves are, or have become, hearing challenged and fully or partially incapable of oral communication, the present inventive system and process have been developed for application particularly to children with hearing impairments or other disabilities adversely impacting capability of oral expression. The inventive system and process presented herein, however, is by no means to be considered as limited in scope as to applying only to children.
Across the spectrum of education, for all age levels and types of student subjects, no greater professional challenge exists than that facing a speech pathologist or teacher striving to help a non-hearing child to learn to speak. Of course, for the hearing-impaired child, learning to speak certainly is no less a challenge. A great number of such children face this challenge at birth or soon thereafter. From that moment on, their challenge seems insurmountable. After all, how can profoundly deaf children understand anything of speech when they cannot perceive words or phrases even when shouted?
Children with hearing impairments are by no means a rare phenomenon. According to the Deafness Research Foundation (2003 State Report Card, Listen up!), “More than 12,000 infants in the United States—one in 300—are born each year with a hearing impairment. Of these, 4000 are profoundly deaf. In fact, hearing loss is the number one birth defect in the United States.” Besides, still others in great numbers will face post-birth hearing loss for a variety of reasons.
While deaf children might readily observe the lip movements of those speaking directly to them, they obviously associate no sound with such movements. Lip movements, to them, are thus meaninglessly silent. Beyond that, the input gained by a “hearing child” listening to sounds from an observed speaker is lost on the profoundly deaf. Depending on the level of hearing, the auditory input may be inadequate or non existent, to be able to make any oral/speech sound associations.
The challenged child will focus instead upon more obvious and imposing movements like gestures or actions. Disadvantaged by an absence or limited reception of auditory models for sounds, the deaf child will either not speak at all or develop a manner of speech that is unintelligible to an unsophisticated public. The challenged child will focus instead upon more obvious and imposing movements like gestures, actions and the surrounding colorful world. Even many hearing children do not cognitively register that the sounds they make are different than the sounds people are saying.
Over the years, innovative therapists, linguists, technologists, teachers and pathologists, and hybrids of two or more of such professions have created helpful tools and processes to address this daunting challenge. They have done so with only limited degrees of success. Still, as will be discussed below, ample room exists for improvement in the educational process. There is a substantial need on the part of educators throughout the world for simpler yet more effective tools.
Teaching strategies, developed and applied with limited or mixed success, have involved phonology, phonetics, and to a limited extent have leveraged the concepts of phonemes. “Phonemes,” in this context, are the individual sounds emitted by speaking. Phonemes are traditionally represented in a phonetic script, wherein each descriptor represents a single phoneme.
For years, linguists and/or speech experts have classified speech sounds into representational categories called phonemes. The American English language finds itself represented by more than four dozen phonemes, although the exact count varies due to vast numbers of dialects indigenous to geographic regions. Phoneme descriptors range, for example, from monophthongs and diphthongs covering more than a dozen vowel forms, to consonant depictions categorized as approximants, nasals, fricatives, plosives, and affricates. No two categorized spoken sounds are the same. Ironically, these esoteric descriptors just mentioned seem to a layperson as a language from a distant world, yet they are in fact subset groupings of all spoken language sounds.
An International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, was developed and first published in 1888 by the International Phonetic Association, an organization founded by Paul Passy. The IPA was modeled on the 1847 works of Isaac Pitman and Henry Ellis, and eventually was revised in 1993, and again in 1996. The IPA is used by speech pathologists and others to transcribe the spoken word in dictionaries to describe the pronunciation of words, and to depict unwritten languages.
The most current chart showing the standard phonemes of the IPA is referenced as prior art within this application, to be further discussed below, and may be accessed and reviewed in more detail at an Internet website http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/pulmonic.html (See: Reproduction of the International Phonetic Alphabet, revised to 1993, updated to 1996; Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada.)
While unknown, or at best little appreciated, by a typical layperson, oral communication fairly flows on the science of the production of phonemes. In brief, it consists of the placement of tongue and teeth within a mouth with specific posture and combines with breath and voicing, which may resonate in the nose or mouth. By stringing these movements and sounds together, they collaborate to form and project the words common to a person's lexicon. In typical oral communications, the listening recipient takes in the uttered phonemes and tones. The recipient hears, interprets, learns, reacts and responds in kind. But, meaningful comprehension and exchange are in no way easy for the hearing or speech impaired, especially if such impairment significant or profound.
A small child with a severe to profound hearing loss may be so close as to sense a speakers fricative or plosive puff of breath, or even so near as to touch her moving lips; yet wholly incapable of associating those complex mouth movements with manner of the production of the phonemes. Figuratively, this small child remains miles away, wandering in a world of silence where interpretive connectivity cannot exist. Under such circumstances, the non-hearing child simply cannot communicatively react by expressing a cogent oral response.
One known strategy for teaching a hearing impaired child to talk is to utilize a teaching aid in the form of a graphic representation or image of a certain sound associated with speaking. The representation usually is presented in isolation. Most typically, speech pathologists or teachers employ letters of the Roman alphabet in association with the sounds being produced or intended. There are problems with trying to represent a sound to a young child in this way. These are discussed as follows.
First, the young child is usually beginning to associate the Roman alphabet name with the letter symbol or physical form presented to him or her. There are 26 letters of the alphabet and some have different sounds associated with them. Thus, any attempt to instruct the child by assigning still another symbol or name, as for example by a phoneme, is understandably confusing.
Second, the phoneme generally is presented as a black-on-white (or reverse) image, and as such is extremely difficult to commit to memory. Third, and adding still more complexity, the English language does not have a one-to-one association of phoneme to alphabet letter. As noted above, there are more than forty-six American English phonemes, while the alphabet is limited to twenty-six characters.
Colors have been employed in reading aids and phonetic systems as a way to enhance effectiveness of learning. As early as 1922, U.S. Pat. No. 1,428,456 to Stranders disclosed the use of colors associated with particular letters of the alphabet.
More recently, Engelbrite described a color-assonant phonetics system in U.S. Pat. No. 6,126,447 to facilitate reading and pronunciation. Engelbrite represents consonant phonemes as a group by depicting them as black letters; while vowel phonemes are depicted as a group by letters each colored in a shade that rhymes with the sound of the vowel.
Uncommon letters are demonstrated in Engelbrite's disclosure as slanted letters, while silent letters are displayed as thin fonts. Under the Engelbright system, three font styles are applied to the English alphabet, along with as many as fifteen colors. To a struggling child, particularly one already coping with severe hearing disability, such a complex system could pose an insurmountable challenge to effective learning.
Charlesworth's U.S. Pat. No. 4,115,932 presents another phonetics system where letters are displayed on tile elements, depicting vowels and various vowel combinations as are known in the science of language as diagraphs and diphthongs. The tiles are given various colors representative of specific vowels and combinations, some of which may be associated through rhyme.
For example, the diphthong “oo” is demonstrated by patentee Charlesworth on a tile given the color blue, where the word “blue” intentionally simulates or rhymes with the spoken sound “oo” common to this diphthong. Unfortunately, rhymes are meaningless to those who are hearing challenged. Diaz-Plaza, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,429,513, presents an interactive teaching apparatus and method involving a complex system of graphemes, grapheme names, phonemes and phonetics, where distinctive colors are associated with speech sounds, depicted by the Roman alphabet
In some teaching systems and processes, combinations of diverse learning media are employed, and may be presented in the form of a learning kit. For example, Hooked on Phonics®, a Santa Ana, Calif. based company has, for more than a dozen years, employed a combination of media and tools to aid communications comprehension by young people. The elements employed as part of such a kit include flash cards, reward stickers, games, music and so forth. The scope of this process and system obviously is limited to helping reactive, “hearing” children learn to read Roman alphabet letters and written words.
In another product, known in the field as Lindamood Phonetics Sequencing or LiPS®, and developed by Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes (based in San Luis Obispo, Calif.), colored felt squares are utilized to determine sound placements within words. In the Lindamood-Bell product, however, no specific color is assigned to a specific phoneme. Besides, students to whom the LiPS® process applies are capable of hearing, but seemingly lack an ability to routinely connect what is heard (or read) with specific phonemes or phoneme sequences. Such children may be presumed to have Attention Deficit Disorder, Central Auditory Processing Disorder, Dyslexia, or some other communicative or processing disorder.
Still other existing products associate animals or objects with the Roman alphabet to represent a sound. A very young child confounded with lack of hearing will see these as daunting visual challenges further complicating her or his situation. Besides, such products and systems fail to recognize that words are rarely pronounced in the same way across different regions.
The published literature, as exemplified above, falls short in terms of providing a useful system or process for teaching speech to people with hearing or speech disabilities. This is particularly true in teaching children and others with severe to profound hearing loss. Granted, a great number of inventions and innovations have been developed and documented to help such children: to learn the alphabet; to translate and thoughtfully process language; to improve their spelling and pronunciation abilities; and to facilitate comprehension of the written word. The problem is that presently known tools, products and systems lack an effective incorporation of phonetics (representing the phonemes of spoken language) in a workable teaching medium to address the critical needs of individuals with severe hearing impairment and young children with speech disorders.
With each passing day, more than a dozen children with profound hearing impairment are born in the United States. Still others are similarly disabled through diseases or accidents. Whether, and how well, they will learn or relearn the critical skills of oral communication depends upon tireless dedication of good teachers and a high quality set of innovative tools and processes. It is painfully evident that prior and/or existing attempts in this regard have served to increase their challenges rather than to facilitate their learning development.
A clear and urgent need exists for a relatively easy-to-use and simple-to-follow system and process to be employed in teaching hearing-impaired children (and other students as may be appropriate and necessary) to speak. This great need is satisfied by the invention to be fully and completely described below.